


Boomerang

by kaasknot



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road, Mad Max: Road Warrior
Genre: Brief body horror, Gen, Mental Instability, mentions of child death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-26
Updated: 2015-05-26
Packaged: 2018-04-01 09:53:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4015312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaasknot/pseuds/kaasknot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I don't know how old I was when Max came to our refinery, but I was young. Young enough to think brittle, broken men were ace. Should've been more careful what I wished for, because I wished to grow up to be just like "Mad" Max Rockatansky, and damn me if I didn't do just that."</p><p>An explanation for the 30-year age discrepancy of the Maxes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boomerang

**Author's Note:**

> The working title for this fic was "Memetic Mutation," because my sense of humor is nothing if not warped. Shoutout to [this](http://kaasknot.tumblr.com/post/119726804369/glamourweaver-ok-im-officially-convinced-1) post, which gave me the idea.

THEN

When I was a boy, a man came to my family's compound. We were refiners. We brewed the juice everyone wanted. Some of them nearly got it, but this man helped us keep it. He got us out safe.

The man's name was Max.

I remember I trailed after him like a puppy. I was just a sprog, then, didn't know or care if I was being a pest. He tolerated me about as well as can be expected. I watched him fill the tanks in the back of his car with guzzoline and water, watched him reset the bomb strapped on the underside that was rigged to blow if anyone tried to siphon his tank.

Max was a strong man, and angry. He had anger like I'd never seen before, anger like a living thing eating him from the inside out. He was a shadow ground sharp by bitterness and loss. I was too young to understand, then. I thought he was aces.

I don't actually know how old I was. I didn't have any parents; Pappagallo said they found me wandering the road, said my ma and pa probably died long back, killed by one of the gangs that were throttling Broken Hill. It was a miracle they found me when they did, they said I was half-starved and delirious. They called me "that feral kid," because it took me to the age of twelve before I bothered to speak beyond grunts.

So I don't know how old I was when Max came to our refinery. But I was young. Young enough to think brittle, broken men were aces. Should've been more careful what I wished for, because I wished to grow up to be just like "Mad" Max Rockatansky, and damn me if I didn't do just that.

***

NOW

"We got us a feral!"

The word echoes in his ears. Feral. Feral. The word settles in the back of his brain like a nest of ants burrowing into the earth, like the bite of the needle in his skin. He can smell blood. Hot metal and blood; his throat spasms. _Why didn't you save us, Max, we needed you_ \--

He runs. Down corridors, chased like a rat in a maze. He nose guides him _water, good--no, it's a trap climb_ his ears guide him _screeching metal voices they're closing in_ his eyes are blinded by faces, by darkness, by sudden light

_Don't move_

And then he _jumps_

But it's not enough

They cover his eyes nose ears and drag him back, a dozen hands on his skin, pulling at his clothes, dragging him back into the pit. His back burns, his lungs burn, panic burns in his veins but there are too many, too many, he wants to scream, there's always too many--

***

THEN

Every town has stories. It's a human need, I think, to tell and retell, to share experiences and maybe embroider them a little. We traveled a lot in those early days, after escaping from Humungus; we heard a lot of stories.

My favorite were Max stories.

They weren't all about Max, of course. But drifters were plenty in the outback, and everyone had a tale to tell about them. I thought they were all the same drifter, before I learned better. I still imagined them as dark-haired and fierce, driving a police interceptor and wearing a brace on his leg. I fancied that brace. Made a dozen braces of my own out of twigs and twisted bark before I outgrew it.

I never outgrew Max stories. I collected them, polishing them until they gleamed in my mind's eye. I patched them together with what I knew of the real Max: he used to be a cop, lost his family. Made deals to help the people he came across.

Max Rockatansky wiped out an entire motorcycle gang, by himself.

Max Rockatansky fended off a pack of dingoes with only a machete and a half-loaded pistol.

Max Rockatansky slayed a giant and rescued children from a witch's clutches.

Max Rockatansky could do no wrong.

I named myself Max, because I wanted to be him. I wanted to be the Road Warrior.

Wasn't long before I grew up. You have to do that quick, out in the wastes; Big Rebecca would probably say I never even got the chance to be a child. She's right, in a way--I killed my first man before I was ten. But there's always a period of relative innocence, and mine ended as soon as we went north.

The whole world was losing its innocence the same time I was, one grinding year after another. First it was the fuel, long before I was born. Food prices soared, people lost their jobs, the economy tanked. Wars started over it, blasting wars that left swathes of land blistered and dead. For a while it seemed civilization might make a comeback, but then the water wars happened, and. Well. What the nuclear winter didn't kill, the radiation did.

I remember seeing green, when I was young. Not much of it, but there was green. And trees. Hard to find much of either, nowadays. Don't imagine I'll see natural green again in my lifetime.

I didn't know any of this when I was a kid. I just knew that my family was moving North. North was a new start, North had water and juice and safety. North was salvation. North was hope.

North was a lie.

We started as a group of about forty; by the time I was fifteen, we had twenty left, and a good half of those were riddled with radiation sickness. Fevers, weak blood, persistent nausea, rashes. Tumors, if we were unlucky. We saw a lot of death, those six years.

The Gyro Captain was a canny fuck, wasn't above using trickery to keep us alive. We would've seen more death if it hadn't been for him. I wouldn't have met my girl if not for him.

Too bad he ended up biting it, too.

***

NOW

He wavers in and out. He's upside down, his feet chained to the rim of a hanging cage. His right foot's gone numb, and the other aches with pins and needles. They're not much, next to the pounding in his head, the prick in his shoulder.

Subclavian artery. Fast kill, if you can hit it.

He's not gonna die quick. These white bastards are canny fucks; they've got him on a drip line, not enough for him to bleed out with dignity. His eyes feel heavy in his skull, weighted by the pull of blood. His feet are cold, numb. His head pounds, but the pressure is easing off into the white bastard under him.

Little shit smells like he's sick, like fever or bad dreams.

That's a familiar smell, alright.

Everything's rocking, back and forth, back and forth. Nice and gentle, like rocking a cra--like a car going slow over rutted ground. The medic ambles by; there's a sharp pull on his hair, and the world tilts crazily as he looks him in the eye. "You're a strong one, ain't you," the medic says, and lets go. Not rocking so gentle, anymore. He swallows back nausea and fixes his gaze downward, on the white bastard below him. War boy. He thinks they're called war boys. Focuses on the droop of his shoulders, the sharp-cut wings of his back. The nausea eases. He notices the lumps on the kid's neck; might be this particular war boy will be meeting his last battle sooner rather than later.

Of course he is. He wouldn't be sucking people dry if he was in fine form.

The blind panic's eased, but adrenaline's making him jumpy. He twitches and swings in his chains. There'll be an out sooner or later, and when he sees it he'll be gone like a possum up a gum tree.

_Long time since I had possum..._

He shakes his head, blinks his eyes into focus. Watches out for the hacksaw they're calling a medic and carefully pins the IV line against his shoulder. Just enough to buy him a little time.

***

THEN

I met Glory in a firefight. A firefight that the Gyro Captain started, because for all he was a clever sort, he had a bad problem of picking fights with the wrong people. How doesn't matter, 'cause it's long over; _who_ doesn't either, because they're all dead. All that matters is that I met Glory.

Glory. I couldn't have picked a better name for her. I ran into her in the middle of the scuffle, when we ducked behind the same wreck for cover. There was a line of blood down her temple, and she was covered in dust. The only clean part of her was the knife in her hand, shining in the sunlight. She nearly stabbed me.

Turned out she'd been running from the gang Gyro pissed off, and the fight was just the distraction she needed to turn around kick them in the nuts. I was half in love with her before I even knew her name.

To this day I'm not sure what she saw in me. I was a kid, a half-feral stripling with whimsy in his heart and too stupid by half. She was too good for me. She was steady as the ground and fierce as the sunrise, and she had a laugh like a kookaburra, brash and loud and shameless. I loved that laugh. Whatever she saw, it was enough to tie the knot with me a year later. She used to laugh and say it was a shame to let a man as pretty as I was wander loose. Who knows what would happen to me.

We grabbed what happiness we could, and held tight until our palms blistered. There was precious little to go around.

Gyro died around the time our watering hole shriveled away. A snake is what did it. The man loved his snakes, and damn him if it didn't bite him in the arse. The rest of us juice jockeys at least had the common sense to die at the business end of a gun, or maybe a bolt, or sometimes from the creeping radiation sickness. Sensible deaths. Deaths that were, if not preventable, at least understandable. But no, the Git Captain had to get on the wrong side of a taipan, like the goose he was. Left us all in the lurch, but especially me.

For some reason they thought I'd be a decent replacement. I wasn't even eighteen yet, just skimming on the edge. But I was a mean shot with a pistol, and I had my boomerang, and I was young enough to be fearless.

The wasteland was becoming the Wasteland at that point. Green was mostly a memory, and the wildlife was going the same way. What was left wasn't recognizable, anymore: birds hatching with six legs and no wings, koalas with their insides born on their outsides. Same with people. I saw a pregnant woman die of blood poisoning when her fetus died and started rotting inside her. She said she'd chance spontaneous abortion rather than risk a coat hanger, and by the time she changed her mind it was too late.

Glory and I were lucky. Our daughter was born healthy and pink. We named her Glory, too, after her mother. Glory-the-Child. She was my world. She gave me strength. She gave me the motivation, the hope, to try and do right by what was left of my family.

Bright thing that I was, I thought maybe if we went west it would get better. Moving hadn't helped us much when I was a sprog, but it probably couldn't hurt more than we were: the water was gone, the fuel was getting gone, and the food was fixing to follow.

I thought I was going to be Mad Max, leading the survivors to freedom.

I forgot the moral of the story, though. Max was alone for a reason.

***

NOW

You promised us. You promised we'd be safe.

_"Tension pneumothorax, you've got to reinflate his lung--"_

Glory! Drop down!

_sting of grit in his knees, dust in his teeth_

Why did you lie, Pa.

_"He's going into shock! He needs blood!"_

_"Where the fuck am I supposed to get that! Do YOU know your blood type?!"_

Not my daughter, too, please, not my Glory-Child--

_"Rebecca! Jesus Christ! Oh my God, oh my God!"_

You killed our daughter. You led them to us. You killed Crusoe. You killed us all.

_engines screaming, scorching as they pass overhead, glassy eyes, gunfire_

Your fault. Your fault. Your fault, _Max._

***

THEN

I led them west. There was fuck-all west but gangs and no water, but I didn't know that. I'd been moving all my life; it made sense to keep moving. It even seemed like a decent answer. Westward lay hills, and there must have been an underground river because we followed a line of springs for a week solid.

Then there were no springs. We blazed a trail through miles of desiccated scrubland until the treads damn near came off our tires, but there was no water to be found. That was fine. We'd planned for that. Our convoy had a ute loaded down with a thousand liter tank of clean water, and each car had its own supply. We had juice, we had supplies for at least a month, we had each other. Some of us were sick, but those of us who weren't were steady in a fight. We figured we were fine.

We hadn't planned on the sheer force of human desperation.

Most of the big cities had chewed themselves to pieces before I was born; the larger towns were crumbling away at the edges, as lawlessness and disease picked off the population. The only ones that stood strong were the little outback villages, the ones already insular to the point of sheer xenophobia.They had supplies, if you didn't mind staring down a double-barrel for the duration of your stay.

I suppose in terms of the Before times they were pretty kooky. Radiation and trauma did funny things to a brain, and names got creative. There was enough of the old guard left to say just how hard it had been to take a warlord named "Humungus" seriously--but they were vanishing fast. Funny names or not, people clung on by their fingernails and got weirder with it.

There's no place for rationality on the edge of extinction. Our tanks of water and fuel were moving targets, and word spread fast as a bushfire that we were coming. We ran out of bullets a month out, on a gang of dieselfreaks chasing guzzoline. They tracked us an entire day before they tried to pin us in a box canyon, but we were better shots. I lost my boomerang, but my girls were safe. We hightailed it while they spun in confusion. 

One little town we stopped at had a tree growing smack in the middle of it, and that made them as much of a target just as we were. Trees only grew where there was water. Come to find out they had a well and a little pumping station tucked inside what looked like a filled-in dunny-can. One of our crew, Crusoe, he had the idea to use our water as collateral against theirs--we wouldn't tell if they didn't. It really loosened the tension, an understanding like that. We had a barbie that night, grilled two sheep and a possum one of the little ones caught. It was skinny bag of bones, but the marrow was good.

Their co-leaders were a married couple, Connor and Jessica. He was like a greyhound, lean and nervy, and she was the heavy Saint Bernard keeping him calm. They'd been sheep farmers before the fallout started making three-headed lambs a common feature.

They had crossbow bolts, we had fuel. It seemed a good enough idea to stay around a little while, give our folk a rest. The town wasn't what you'd call rich, but they had enough, and we did our best not to impose. We were only ten people, anyway; nothing like the load we could have been.

A few days stretched into a few weeks, until people started making noise about sticking around. One of our girls had taken a shine to one of their boys, and we were all tired. I was more than willing to stop moving. I consulted with Jess and Connor, and they were amenable. We were good fighters, and they had walls, which was something we were short on. It was a good situation.

I forgot about the dieselfreaks. Figured they'd left us for tough prey, but they didn't agree. They attacked the settlement in the dead of night, while we were asleep and off-guard.

It still feels like a nightmare.

***

NOW

She's vicious as a dingo, and twice as fast.

It's hard to squeeze out words when madness or fear aren't driving them from behind. He doesn't speak much, anyway. Grunts do just fine. He stands there at the end of the truck, completely unable to process what he sees. Five women, bathing in the desert. The front part of his brain registers their softness, their lack of weapons, but the hind part has him good in its grip. He's got a solid clutch on his deadweight war boy, and he shifts his grip on the useless sawed-off. One move, one twitch, and he's gone, or he's tearing out throats with his teeth.

Gone, for preference. He doesn't like the look of the one by the air-intake vent, the one missing an arm. She's as soft as hardpack sand and twice as unforgiving.

But he can smell the water, smell the way it's soaking rich into the dirt and caking up mud, and part of him cringes at the waste-- _shut it the fuck off, christ, it's no good on the ground_ \--but the larger part, the hind-brain part, doesn't give a tight shit. He waggles the shotgun.

"Water."

The first one comes up, and she's fat with a baby. His gaze skitters away to her eyes, and skitters away from those, too. He makes her turn around while he sprays himself full in the face. The water's warm and tastes like the inside of a tanker truck, but who cares in the desert. He drinks and burps and tries to keep it out of his nose.

He's still got the war boy chained to his head, so he gestures next to the pasty twig, the one begging to crisp in the heat. She looks like a stiff sneeze could knock her flat. He holds out his chain.

The problem with picking the least-threatening one is that she's also the dag of the group. Nuttier than he is, wearing boots bigger than she is, and couldn't fucking cut her way out of a paper sack. His head yaws to the side, and the other one, the dangerous one, she tackles him clean off his feet.

Vicious as a dingo. Twice as fast.

***

THEN

When I woke I smelled smoke. Thick, choking smoke, full of the smell of burning wood and charred meat. Some shred of instinct kept me quiet. Some shred of that little feral kid I used to be. I heard voices, then revving engines joining into a crescendo before fading into the distance.

My head ached. My eyelashes felt glued together. It was easier to let my head drop and go back under.

When I woke the second time, I wished I hadn't. I was still on my back, where I'd landed when the ute plowed into me head-on. My ribs were a stabbing mess and my head ached like a split log, but some curse of God left the rest of me perfectly intact. Memory flared--

Glory-the-Child, screaming for her pa, getting run down by the same truck that ran me over not two seconds later. I snapped upright, shook off the streak of pain that blurred my vision. Where was Glory.

Not far, was the answer. I don't know how long I cradled her. Long enough for the sky to deepen into twilight. I laid her down gently, stroked the tangled curls she got from her mother. The edges of the world blurred, dulled. A crevasse opened in the back of my heart, big enough to bury a parent's hopes. God, I howled.

Eventually I could leave her. I felt as brittle as an old man, brittle as one of the poor shits who wandered too close to an impact crater and came away with their flesh soughing off their bones. I gathered them all, carried them to the town square and laid them out under the tree.

Big Rebecca. The Captain's girl. Crusoe. Connor and Jess. All the rest of our band and theirs.

Glory. Glory-Child.

A few were missing, gone without a trace. Odds were high they'd been taken by the raiders. Humans were a cheap crop. I figured from the tire tracks they were a solid day and a half ahead of me, riding to raise Cain. There wasn't a way in hell I could've caught them, not with just me and no car to drive--they'd siphoned all our tanks.

Only it turned out there was a car, one of theirs out by the crossing. It had a broken brake line. Looked like they'd run it into a stump when the brakes failed and didn't bother hitching it up to take it with them. It was an easy repair, what with all the empty cars lying around. There was brake fluid aplenty to scavenge.

I didn't think of that until later, though. All I could think of was that it was a Ford Falcon, the same as the police interceptors back in the day. It wasn't supercharged, and it didn't have the reinforced front end--but it was black, and it was--it should have--

I lost time. I lost years, in retrospect, but it started in that moment. I grabbed the nearest rock I could and I threw it at that car, then picked up another and another, and threw those, too. I heard a sound like a wildcat screaming, but all I could think was, _He didn't come. He didn't save us._

That car took a beating by the time I was done with it. Broke the windscreen and the side mirrors, dented the sheet metal all to hell. I'd idolized that car for as long as I'd idolized the man, and it had betrayed us, too. Just like I had. I'd taken them west, I hadn't covered our tracks, I'd thought we were safe. My family's blood was on my hands, and the blood of a dozen other good people. I was no better than the raiders.

I spent three days in the burnt remains of the village fixing the interceptor. I cobbled together a supercharger from the remains of the convoy, and replaced the brake lines and brake fluid. I wired up that car _exactly_ as I remembered it.

Then I got in and drove away.

***

NOW

He's tense enough to break through his own skin. The wrong move, he just might. The pregnant woman is next to him. She's got anger spitting through her, eating her from the inside out, but she's soft. And her baby makes her vulnerable. Good collateral, if things escalate. There was a time he would have been horrified at himself for thinking that, but that was a long time ago. He shoves that thought back in the lock box it snuck out of.

"What's your name?"

He snaps to look at the other woman. Furiosa. She's tense, too, the trapped nervousness of uncertainty. She's looking at him.

"Your _name_ ," she says again, as though he's a small child being stubborn.

He doesn't have a name. He lost it along with his humanity, and it was never his to begin with.

"Doesn't matter," he says.

She is exasperated. "Then when I say 'fool', you drive out of here as fast as you can." Her gaze is weighted, purposeful. "This is the sequence: one, one, two--" She gives him the kill switch sequence, and a chill crawls down his spine. That feral creature in the back of his mind snarls, hunching back in its corner. _Why? Why is she trusting me?_

A quiver of panic sets its teeth into him. It's too much--he can't--he'll fail them, and then he'll see their blood spilled across the sand--

The pregnant woman gasps and grabs her belly.

" _Fool!_ "

He lunges for the switch.

***

THEN

I drove my interceptor into the bush and the bush withered away around me. Life constricted to a repeated search for water, for fuel, for food, for shelter. I didn't let myself think, I didn't let myself remember. I drifted in the wind, chasing the next tank of juice. I stood aside as communities starved, or tore themselves apart, or were eaten by vultures. I did nothing.

Ghosts rose up at night, screaming my failures at me, mocking my childhood naivete. I walked past the living, and they pulled away, called me mad.

The future belonged to the mad, I figured. I fit right in.

***

NOW

"One of them's for you," Furiosa says.

He looks out over the salt flats. They're cool and white, but in the morning they'll turn into a blazing pan of reflected heat. They won't be able to push the bikes if they don't want the engines to warp. He looks back to her, silver-and-shadow and strangely vulnerable in her blanket. There's a fire burning behind her eyes, a kindled hope. The green place almost killed it, but it's still there, still fighting. He's terrified for that kindle of hope. West, east, it makes no difference; whatever direction you drive there won't be a happy ending.

"Hope is a mistake," he says, fumbling for the words. "If you can't fix what's broken, you'll go insane." _Don't try to be a hero_ , he tries to say. _Don't dream, you'll only have nightmares._

But she doesn't listen. He stands on the bluff and watches them drive until they're specks in the distance, and he stands between his options, torn right to the bone. Does he hope, or does he take the easier path, the way he has for the past twenty years?

_Come on, Pa!_

He takes the bike and chases after them. 

***

"Max. My name is Max." His hands are shaking, he's giddy and terrified. It comes out half as a plea to a forgotten god, and half as a torch flaming into the darkness of his soul. "That's my name."

And she lives. His blood fills her veins and she _lives_.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [tumblr](http://kaasknot.tumblr.com/post/119956399044/boomerang-kaasknot-mad-max-series-movies), come flail at me.


End file.
